“Yes or no?” Odin said, sliding his finger back up again, up under my skirt this time.
I shoved back, took my legs off the desk, and stood to face him, planting a finger in the middle of his chest. “A, Diego is right in the other room, so shut it. And B, a kink is only fun if all parties involved are into it.”
“Let’s not get extreme, goddess,” Odin said.
Thor smirked.
Diego and Zeus came back out just then. I shot Odin and Thor warning looks as Zeus and Diego shook hands.
Zeus had been getting more intense and possessive lately—couldn’t they see that? It was wrong to push him and goad him.
Zeus turned to us once Diego was out the door. “You up to speed, Thor?”
Thor smiled. “Certainly am.”
“Come on,” Zeus said. “Don Galvano’s expecting us in an hour.”
Chapter Two
Don Galvano presided over his old-school mafia family from a deco-style mansion in the Palisades. Zeus pulled our vehicle du jour, a black Range Rover, up to ornate white gates.
“Pearly,” I said.
Odin smirked.
I was sitting sandwiched between Odin and Zeus up front. Thor was in back tapping and clicking his phone.
“It’s good you’re here, goddess,” Odin said. “It will feel less threatening, more social, less like gangster shit.”
“Not to mention you promised I’m an equal player in this,” I reminded them all. “Except for instances of clear and present danger.”
It was a promise they might be regretting, but they made it, and I didn’t intend to let them forget.
A man came out of a little white watchman box and ambled up to the driver’s side window.
Zeus told him we were friends of Diego’s, and that the don was expecting us. The guy nodded and instructed us to wait. Then he went back into his wee hut.
“Nice place. What’s Galvano into?” I asked.
“These days he’s mostly extortion and gambling with some extended interests in Vegas,” Zeus said. “A little bit of high-end flesh.”
“Oh, high-end flesh,” I said. “That’s classy.”
Quick as a flash, Zeus had me on his lap, face right close to mine. “You got something to say about my choice of terminology?”
“Sure do,” I said, pulse racing.
“Do I need to bend you over my knee?”
Sure might, I thought.
“Oh, Isis,” Odin said sadly, snaking a hand around my belly.
Zeus took my lips in a furiously dominating kiss as the gate opened. He broke off the kiss but kept hold of me on his lap as he drove through. We parked at the end of a line of shiny cars, most of them big and black.
I heard a zipper sound in the back. Here?
But it was Thor’s satchel.
We got out. Zeus threw on a sport jacket and sunglasses. With his short brown hair and muscular grace, he had the look of a billionaire Navy SEAL, which I can tell you was not a bad look at all.
Odin was in black—basic black button-down hanging open over a black T-shirt. Black jeans. Black hair. Black lush eyelashes. Black five o’clock shadow. Black smarty-pants eyeglasses, his usual delectability. Poor Odin always tried so hard to tone down his beautiful male model looks and go for a gruff badass appearance, and it never worked. He could glue a dead tarantula to his nose, and even then, people would be like, why does that super-hot guy have a dead tarantula glued to his nose?
Thor took my arm as we walked up the steps. He was Mr. Casual, still in his scrub pants and corduroy shirt.
I always felt so proud, going places with my hot and wonderful guys. And right there I decided the watching thing was stupid. Yeah, I liked thrills, but what more did I need than these three awesome men? I was the luckiest woman on the planet.
Zeus rang the doorbell. I smoothed my skirt and grabbed a mint from my purse. Thor put out his hand so I gave him one, then Zeus and Odin wanted mints, too. Sometimes they were like kids, really.
The door was opened by a giant man with zero body fat, a large weaponry bulge under his jacket, and a shaved head to complete the extra-fierce look. “You’re Diego’s people?” he asked.
“Yup. Here to see the don.”
The guy nodded and led us through one room and another, each more lavishly bedecked than the last.
We finally arrived in the study where we found the don, a large man with a big belly, a bald dome of a head, and an expression like he just ate a lemon. This was a classic study lined with bookcases stuffed with dusty-looking hardcover books. The furniture was all dark wood and leather, and there was even a globe on a stand. All super-masculine. Even the globe was black—none of that pastel shit for the mafia don! The man liked a fucking black globe!
“Don Galvano.” Zeus held out his hand. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with us. And Diego really appreciates it, too.”
“Yeah, I heard you’re P.I.s now,” the don said. “I had to see this for myself. The three of you, now the four, you got more heat on you than I ever did.” He gestured back and forth, sweeping us all into his sentence. “What the fuck are you doing with the P.I. shit?”
“We’re investigating this matter with Diego…”
“No, no, no, I don’t give a shit about that. That’s not why I agreed to meet you. I just gotta ask you what you’re doing. Considering the kind of heat you have on you, I mean…” he gestured again. “The kind of heat I got on me, I can pull outta that heat of in a court of law. I’m a legitimate businessman.“
Of course he didn’t bother with air quotes for legitimate businessman. Those air quotes were assumed, I guess, and it would be uncool to use them, in the same way it would be dorky if my bank robbers put air quotes around the phrase make a withdrawal when they talked about knocking over a bank. The underworld version of suspenders and flood pants.
“But your kind of heat,” he continued. “I mean, if your people catch up with you, that’s not going to be resolved in a court of law. That shit is going to be resolved in the belly of a tanker, if you catch my meaning. Why would you risk these kinds of investigations?”
“Never mind about us,” Odin said.
Practically right at the same time, Zeus said, “We’ll worry about our own safety.”
“No, wait,” I said. “Investigating a crime is way safer than a bank robbery.”
Galvano snorted. “Think it through.”
“Can we get back to business?” Odin said. “We’re here on Diego’s behalf.”
“No, I want to hear what the don has to say,” I said.
“Who can hurt you?” the don asked.
I was thinking the police, but mostly ZOX, the covert agency Zeus and Odin were once in. They were eternally after us. Especially the agent assigned to our case, Agent Denko.
“The feds, right?” the don said.
“They can only hurt us if they can find us,” I say.
The don raised his brows.
Riiiiight. Somebody could help ZOX find us.
“Nobody’s going to fuck with us,” Odin said.
“Could I hurt you?” the don asked.
“You wouldn’t,” Zeus said.
“Give me a reason to hurt you, I might try. When you were only hitting banks, nobody in our community had a problem with you. I’d go as far as to say you had empathy and respect from every corner, poking a stick into the man’s eye like you do.”
I nodded, knowing it was true. Nothing says fuck you to the man like a big, loud takeover-style bank robbery in broad daylight.
“Everybody loves seeing you guys ripping off banks. But let’s pretend for a moment that asshole Diego isn’t the one who crashed my car. I know it was him, but let’s pretend it wasn’t. That means somebody else did. That means some guy out there knows you’re taking all your skills you developed over all those years of doing whatever covert shit you were doing and you’re pointing all those skills at him. You’re coming for him. Suddenly, you got yourself an enemy inside the community, and
you don’t know who the fuck he is. But he knows who you are.”
“Oh my god,” I said.
Zeus shook his head. “It’s fine, Ice.”
Odin glowered.
“What better way to save themselves than drop a dime to the feds? Let ‘em know the God Pack is back in L.A. and even where you’d be.”
“Nobody would do that, goddess,” Thor said softly, “because they know they’d fucking die.”
“You so sure about that?” Galvano asked. “Nobody thinks they’re going to get caught—not even by you. You’re successful bank takeover guys. Why hang out a fucking shingle like this when you have all the money in the world?”
“Because we are awesome investigators who spit in the faces of our enemies,” Odin said.
“And nobody tells us what to do or stops us from helping our friends,” Thor added. “We believe Diego, and we’re going to prove he’s innocent.”
And I believed that for Thor and Odin, these were the reasons. Defiance. Excellence. Righting wrongs.
But for Zeus, it was something more.
I turned to him and waited for him to explain why it was so important to him to start the agency, even in the face of danger.
“A man does what he does,” Zeus answered simply.
A man does what he does?
The don held up his hand, sensing this was all he’d get. “Okay. Fine.”
But it wasn’t enough for me, and I couldn’t help but think about what the Gigis, a gang of female jewel thieves, had said in the bathroom one time—that my guys were on a death sprint that would end with them crashing and burning.
“Now can we get to Diego’s matter here?” Zeus said.
“Diego? The piece of shit who took my car for a joyride and won’t own up to it?” Don Galvano waved the air, shoving an imaginary Diego aside.
I felt angry on Diego’s behalf. I knew he wouldn’t have come to us if he wasn’t innocent.
“It’s only for Maria’s sake he’s not lying in a ditch with his balls cut off,” the don said.
Zeus said, “We’d love to take a look at that footage you have.”
“So you can torque up some excuse why it’s not him? The footage shows him clear as day driving my car. He thought he could take it for a joyride while we were across the pond, and he wouldn’t fess up once he wrecked it.”
“You think your future son-in-law would hire somebody as awesome as us if he did it?”
“Maybe he’s hired you to effect his cover-up,” the don said. “To twist around the scenario—”
“We don’t do cover-ups,” Zeus growled, moving toward Galvano. “And if you think just because Diego’s paying us that we’re his bitches, you’re fucked. And if you think cover-ups are our business, we’ve got a major fucking problem between us.”
Odin slapped his hand onto Zeus’s shoulder, urging restraint, but he looked like he wanted to kill the don himself. “We were trained as fucking-g investigators. We will not be manipulated. We will not be bought.”
I held my breath as Thor echoed them. My guys had first met when Odin had been sent to kill Thor, who’d been working as a doctor with an aid organization and had reported atrocities. When Odin had arrived and learned the truth, he’d decided to protect Thor. The not-supposed-to-exist agency ZOX had then sent their very, very best weapon—Zeus—out to kill them both, but Zeus, too, turned against ZOX. The three of them made a lot of trouble bringing the truth to light and earned targets on their backs forever.
Thus began their lives as fugitives. High-performance outlaws.
Don Galvano shrugged. “I’m not playing Diego’s game.”
Zeus got a little bit in his face. “Are you suggesting we can’t get to the truth or won’t get to the truth?”
“Hold on.” I put a hand on Zeus’s arm. “Let me ask you, Mr. Galvano, where is Maria on all this?”
“She wants to believe that scumbag, but she saw the tapes. She knows. It’ll be good for her to get out of here.”
“And what if it wasn’t Diego? You’re trying to help Maria by sending her out of the country, but what if she finds out it wasn’t Diego, but it’s too late? And what if she finds out you blocked Diego’s one chance to clear his name? Maybe you don’t want to cooperate with us for Diego’s sake, and I understand that. But don’t you want to be sure for Maria’s sake?”
The don sniffed, unconvinced, but I thought I might be getting through. I looked down at my fingernails, long and lovely and pink. “What do you have to lose? If we find out it really was him, well, all the better.”
“And if it’s not him,” Odin said, “you get to put somebody else in the ditch with their balls cut off—”
“An extremely unpleasant way to go,” Thor interjected.
Odin continued, “Imagine if somebody out there is fucking with you. Laughing at you. Wouldn’t you want to know?”
The don was silent for a while. “You think there’s any kind of chance it wasn’t Diego?”
“We got an open mind and badass skills,” Zeus said. “It’s just some footage, man.”
The don frowned. “What kind of confidentiality can I expect in terms of where this camera is placed?”
Zeus merely tilted his head, fixing the don with a level stare.
The don looked thoughtful. He wandered over to his badass black globe and gave it a spin, then another. Then he stepped out of the room and into the hallway to speak in hushed tones with the guy who’d let us in—the butler, or whatever you call a butler-bodyguard combination, which probably shouldn’t be butguard.
Odin came around and put his hands on my shoulders. “What do you think about him, Ice?”
“Stubborn,” I said, “but he cares about his daughter.”
“No, is he your type?” Odin clarified. “To watch?”
I spun around. “Are you out of your mind?”
Zeus got up into Odin’s face. “Isis doesn’t want a watcher.”
“If that’s what you think,” Odin growled, “then you haven’t been paying attention.”
Zeus took hold of Odin’s shirt. “We don’t share her.”
Thor said, “It’s not sharing to have an audience. That’s just a step sideways of a sex tape.”
Zeus cast a wild glance at Thor, still holding Odin by the shirt. “You’re on his side?”
Thor put up his hands. “I’m on the side of maximizing Isis’s pleasure.”
“This fighting isn’t maximizing my pleasure,” I whispered loudly.
Zeus kept his hands on Odin.
Odin looked wild and energized, and there was a mad gleam in his eyes.
“You guys, come on!”
“She has a type for watching,” Odin said. “Ask her.”
“We don’t share Isis,” Zeus said. “No watchers.”
Odin’s eyes glittered. “Is that a new rule?”
Zeus frowned and yanked him harder.
My heart pounded. “Stop it!”
“Is it true? You have a type for watching, Ice?” Zeus asked, not taking his eyes from Odin.
“Fuck you both! My type is you guys!” I tried to pull them apart. No go.
“Yes or no,” Odin said. “Tell him. You have a type for watching. Is it this guy? An in-charge operator?”
“We’re not making the mafia don watch us have sex,” I said. “Not that we could.”
“I can make anybody do anything.” Odin’s threatening tone chilled me. It was sometimes easy to forget how really dangerous these guys were.
It was probably bad that that turned me on a little bit.
I looked over at Thor, who seemed amused. Of course. He loved chaos.
“All of you can fuck off,” I said. “Seriously. Fuck off.”
Don Galvano was suddenly back in the room. “Everything alright?”
Odin smiled as Zeus released him. “Office politics,” he said.
The don went around the desk, opened a laptop, and shoved a thumbdrive into the slot. “Here’s the footage. This is you
r copy. Personalized.”
I assumed there was some significance to that personalized comment. Probably a threat in there, like he’d be able to know if we shared it.
“Here, take a look,” the don said. “It’s at 50:41.”
We gathered around the back of the desk and watched the streetscape on the screen. Cars whizzed by, back and forth. Now and then they rolled to a stop.
“Red light,” Don Galvano said. “Your boy’s up next.”
The light changed and the cars sailed by once again. A white Corvette was the first to stop at the next red light. I bit my lip. Diego. The shot wasn’t great, even for high definition, but it was clearly him. The long hair. The tattoo. Don Galvano paused the clip and selected the area for zooming in. The video got pixelated close up. But wow, it was damning.
“Hmm,” Odin said.
“Definitive enough for you?” the don said. “You gonna tell me somebody wore a wig and went through that kind of trouble to get that tattoo painted on his arm? And for what? If Diego’s got an enemy who’ll go through that amount of trouble, this isn’t what they’re going to do.”
“This is helpful,” Odin said.
The don wasn’t satisfied. “You see what I’m talking about?”
“We see that it’s convincing,” Zeus said.
The don rolled his eyes.
“Do a lot of people know about this camera?”
“Not a lot. Not at all.”
“Diego? Maria?”
He shook his head.
“How many of these cameras do you have between here and there?” Odin asked.
“I’m going to tell you that now?” The don barked—it wasn’t really even a laugh.
“Put it this way,” Zeus said, standing. “If we were to hop in a car and drive aimlessly around the surface streets for an hour, how likely are we to pass one of these babies? Not asking where, just level of coverage.”
“On a light traffic day,” Thor added.
“An hour? Mmm…” The don pondered this.
“How about ninety minutes?” Zeus said after a while.
“Ninety, I’d imagine you’d pass one. An hour, you’re getting lucky.”
“So it’s not like they’re all over the place,” Zeus said.
“No.”
“Where’s the car now?” Zeus asked.
The Most Wanted (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers #4) Page 4
